The Moses Stone

finally discovered what then became known as Cave 1 at Qumran.

Once the first cave had been found, further searches were carried out and the other caves in the area were explored. The scrolls were found in eleven of these caves, but no scrolls or fragments were ever discovered at Qumran itself.

The first archaeological expedition to Qumran was led by Father Roland de Vaux of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. He began his excavations in Cave 1 in 1949, and two years later started digging at Qumran as well. This approach was badly flawed, because de Vaux assumed that the inhabitants of Qumran had written the scrolls, and used the contents of them to deduce what Qumran must have been.

It was a classic circular argument, and the result was entirely predictable: because the scrolls were mainly religious texts, de Vaux came to the conclusion that the inhabitants of Qumran were devoutly religious, a sect called the Essenes. Every artefact he and his team recovered from the site was interpreted in line with this assumption, despite the lack of any empirical evidence to support this conclusion. So a water cistern became a Jewish ritual bath, and so on, and any finding that disagreed with this hypothesis was simply ignored or assumed to be later contamination.

The Copper Scroll and its listing of tons of buried treasure, of course, flew directly in the face of de Vaux's interpretation of the site, and he dismissed it out of hand as either a hoax or some kind of joke.

The Copper Scroll

The Copper Scroll is still one of the more perplexing mysteries of Middle Eastern archaeology. Discovered by Henri de Contenson in 1952 in Cave 3 at Qumran, it was completely unlike any other relic found anywhere, before or since. Although generally regarded as one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, absolutely the only reason for this assumption is that it was found with other scrolls in one of the caves at Qumran. In every other respect – material, content and language – it is entirely different.

Made from almost pure – 99 per cent – copper, the preparation of which would have been extremely difficult, and almost eight feet in length, the scroll is simply an inventory, a matter-of-fact listing of the whereabouts of an enormous hoard of treasure. The language used is unusual. It's an early form of Hebrew – what's known as a square-form script – which appears to have some linguistic affinity with pre-Mishnaic Hebrew and even Aramaic, but some of the expressions used are only completely comprehensible to readers familiar with both Arabic and Akkadian. In short, the palaeography (the style of writing) and the orthography (the spelling) used in the Copper Scroll are unlike any other known contemporary texts, from Qumran or anywhere else.

Another peculiarity is the presence of a handful of Greek letters that follow certain of the locations listed, and the first ten of which do, as stated in this novel, spell out the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. Theories abound, but nobody has so far produced any convincing reason why this should be.

It's been suggested that the Copper Scroll contains some thirty mistakes, of the kind that would be expected from a scribe copying a document written in a language with which he was unfamiliar, suggesting the possibility that the contents of the scroll had been copied from another, perhaps earlier, source. This, again, is pure conjecture.

The locations of the hidden treasure listed in the Copper Scroll are both highly specific and completely useless. The depth at which a cache of gold has been buried, for example, is described in detail, but discovering the actual location requires an exhaustive knowledge of town and street names, plus property ownership information, from first-century Judea, knowledge that has been lost for two millennia.

The general consensus among archaeologists is that the Copper Scroll probably is genuine, and that the treasures listed were hidden in the Judean desert. It's even possible that one of them has been found: in 1988 a small earthenware vessel containing a dark, sweet-smelling oil was found in a cave not far from Qumran, and one interpretation of a listing on the Copper Scroll suggests that it could have been one of the items recorded.

The Silver Scroll

Perhaps the most intriguing entry of all on the Copper Scroll is the last one, which states that another document had been hidden that contained more detailed information about the location of the various treasures. One translation of this enigmatic section of the text reads: A copy of this inventory list, its explanation and the measurements and details of every hidden item, is in the dry underground cavity that is in the smooth rock north of Kohlit. Its opening is towards the north with the tombs at its mouth.

This other document – which has become known as the Silver Scroll – was one of several treasures claimed to be hidden in the city of Kohlit, but the exact location of this place is unknown. There is an area named Kohlit lying to the east of the Jordan River, but there's no evidence to suggest that this is the place referred to in the Copper Scroll, and the only other 'Kohlit' in the Middle East is K'eley Kohlit in Ethiopia, much too far away to be a possibility. The other clue is the reference to the 'tombs at its mouth'. This could be interpreted to indicate a north-facing cave close to a burial ground, but is of little real help.

But the important point is that, if the Copper Scroll is an authentic listing of buried treasure, then the reference to the Silver Scroll must also be assumed to be authentic, which means that this legendary object did exist. The authors of the Copper Scroll presumably knew exactly where the Silver Scroll was secreted, because of their accurate – though meaningless to us – description of its location. But that doesn't mean the relic is still in the same location specified in the Copper Scroll.

The first century AD was a time of tremendous turmoil in Judea, with constant skirmishes between bands of Jewish rebels and the Roman legions, and it's certainly possible that important objects – which would have implicitly included both the Copper Scroll and the Silver Scroll – could have been removed from their hiding places and taken to locations that were more secure. The caves at Qumran were one such place, and proved to be a safe repository for the Dead Sea Scrolls for almost two millennia. It's quite possible that Ein-Gedi was thought to be another.

Ein-Gedi

As stated in The Moses Stone, the oasis at Ein-Gedi was one of the most important settlements outside Jerusalem during the first century AD, and was raided by the Sicarii during the siege of Masada, exactly as I described. It is certainly possible that the Jewish priests might have believed the Temple was under imminent threat fromthe advancing Roman army, and would have tried to remove their most important treasures to a place of safety. If so, Ein-Gedi would have been an obvious choice.

If the Temple of Jerusalem had been the custodian of the Copper Scroll, Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant at this time, the presence of these relics at the oasis beside the Dead Sea would not have been unexpected. And during their raid, the Sicarii would probably have grabbed anything they could lay their hands on.

If these Zealots did unexpectedly find themselves in possession of three of the holiest treasures of the Jewish nation, they would have done everything in their power to ensure that the hated Romans wouldn't be able to seize them, hence my fictional account of the four Sicarii clambering down from the fortress at Masada.

The Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall

The Western Wall – of which the Wailing Wall is a part – is one of the four retaining walls of the Temple Mount, and its construction shows a distinct gradation from the bottom to top. The courses of masonry at the base, and extending to about two-thirds of the way up, are formed from large single blocks of light-coloured stone, the biggest ones probably at least a metre cubed. Above them, significantly smaller stones have been used, all the way to the top.

The wall isn't a single structure, though the lower part looks as if it is. In fact, only the lowest seven courses of stones have indented borders, so they are all that date from Herod's time, when he strengthened the Temple Mount in 20 BC. Above them, the next four layers of stones are slightly smaller, and they were laid down during the Byzantine period, which ran from AD 330 to 640. The third section, above that, was built after the Muslim capture of Jerusalem in the seventh century, and the layer at the very top is the most recent, added in the nineteenth century. That was paid for by a British philanthropist named Sir Moses Montefiore. What isn't visible are the further seventeen courses of stones, all now underground because of the almost constant building and rebuilding that has taken place in that part of the city.

The Jews were banned from visiting the Wall again between 1948 and 1967, when the city was controlled by the Jordanians, but during the Six Day War Israeli paratroopers seized the Temple Mount and this area of Jerusalem. They had no strategic objective in doing so, but the site had always been of immense religious and symbolic significance to the nation. Within weeks, over a quarter of a million Jews had visited the Wall. When the Israelis took control, most of what is now called the Kotel Plaza was already built on, and the only bit of the